This paper examines the association between acquisiton-related provision-taking behaviour and post-acquisition performance for a sample of UK firms that undertook large acquisitions between 1989 and 1995. We find evidence that provision-taking was associated with declining accounting and...

Until 1998, UK accounting standards allowed firms to write off goodwill directly against shareholders' equity, bypassing the income statement altogether. Many critics contended that this accounting practice allowed firms to inflate profits in the post-acquisition period by taking unwarranted...

This paper examines the association between acquisition-related provision-taking behaviour and post-acquisition performance for a sample of UK firms that undertook large acquisitions between 1989 and 1995. We find evidence that provision-taking was associated with declining accounting and...

Large shareholders are a potentially very important element of firms’ corporate governance system. Whereas analytical research is typically vague on who these large shareholders are, in practice there are important variations in the types of large owners (and the different types of large...

Using an extensive panel of cross-border M&A transactions between 1990 and 2007, we find that firms from developing countries, compared with those from developed countries, bid higher on average to acquire assets in developed countries. We are interested in why these higher bids occur. We find...